Assessing it service-learning

• Authors: Rick Homkes
• Venue: SIGITE '08 Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
• Year: 2008

Service-Learning is the delivery of a service to the community within the context of an educational program of study. Going further, it is a form of experiential learning, applying what was learned within a classroom or laboratory setting to problems of the real world. Using service-learning, students in information technology can experience the unstructured problems of a real world situation while having the structure of a university course. While one major goal of service-learning is service, the delivery of some benefit to the community partner, the other major goal is for the students to achieve the learning that is part of the department's education objectives. It is therefore a pedagogy which should be investigated for efficacy as any other pedagogy would be. This paper investigates how information technology based service-learning could be measured for both service and learning. For service, a longer term follow-up with the non-profit partners is presented. The purpose is to ascertain if the service learning project really did help the non-profit partners provide their services better, or, conversely, if the service-learning project was really a "feel good" project for the student and a "promotion" project for the community partner. For the learning portion of service-learning, a review of assessment methods is presented. These methods look at two areas, the application of Information Technology domain specific hard skills and also the application of other skills such as teamwork, communication, and project management. The use of a project postmortem is proposed as a reflective exercise to measure how the student participants have been changed in the process.